Bio

Mark J. Estren, Ph.D., has a highly unusual background that includes journalism, academia, healthcare, classical music and senior-level business positions. As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut), he dual-majored in Classics (Latin) and English, with a minor in Music, and both ran the campus radio station and was managing editor of the college's newspaper. At Columbia University (New York City), where he received his M.S. in Journalism, he specialized in broadcasting, produced and narrated radio documentaries on the U.S. invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and on the underground press, and was awarded the First Pulitzer Fellowship for his study of underground comics and cartoonists -- which eventually formed the basis of his book, A History of Underground Comics.

Dr. Estren continued his graduate work, now in the dual fields of Psychology and English, at the University at Buffalo (New York), where his Ph.D. thesis examined psychological horror in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, and where one of the courses he created and taught was entitled "Obscenity, Pornography and the Law."

Dr. Estren worked as a producer, and subsequently Senior Producer and Executive Producer, for CBS and ABC News. He created the national version of The Nightly Business Report for PBS and was president of UPI Television, a division of United Press International, where he created programs featuring investigative journalist Jack Anderson and former Social Security Commissioner Dorcas Hardy. He was General Manager of Financial News Network, a national, business-focused cable network eventually purchased by NBC.

In print media, Dr. Estren was a news and business editor for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald. He was president of Infotechnology Publishing Corporation, owner of High Technology Business magazine, where he served as editor and publisher, and the newsletters High Tech Tomorrow and Andrew Seybold's Outlook on Personal Computing. And he served as classical-music critic of The Washington Post, drawing on his experience as a conductor at Tanglewood Institute, where he studied under Erich Leinsdorf and Leonard Bernstein.

Dr. Estren did turnaround and merger-and-acquisition management for a publicly traded business development company, specializing in media properties. In the healthcare field, he has spent more than 25 years doing research and writing on a wide variety of subjects for newsletters including Bottom Line/Personal, Bottom Line/Tomorrow, Boardroom Reports, Bottom Line/Health and Bottom Line/Women's Health. And he has written a series of very well-received books on important healthcare topics, all published by Ronin Publishing:

Heal Yourself! How to Harness Placebo Power

Healing Hormones

Prescription Drug Abuse

Statins: Miraculous or Misguided?

Personal: Dr. Estren lives in Fort Myers, Florida. He is divorced and the father of two grown children. His hobbies include classical music, book reviewing (which he has also done professionally), and reptiles (he is a trained herpetologist).